My parents immigrated from Taiwan, and raised me with standard Asian norms which roughly map to “guess culture”. I now find myself spending a lot of time in rationalist circles, where American and Jewish “ask culture” is much more prevalent.

Some examples of guess culture:

• Offering to do favors (often hoping they’ll say no)
• Conversely: almost never outright asking for things, instead dropping hints about what you need
• Reading the room; caring about “face” or reputation
• Doing things for people behind their back (eg matchmaking them)
• Fighting for the check
• Tracking debts & favors implicitly, instead of settling up explicitly (eg venmo’ing exact splits)

Do these behaviors seem kind of backwards, quaint? At a Manifest side session, one Asian rationalist complained about how confusing and stifling these guess culture norms were for him, growing up. Why not just state things plainly, say what you mean?

I think there are many good things about the explicitness of ask culture — or the hypothetical rationalist ideal of “tell culture”. (It certainly makes things easier for those on the more autistic side.) But I also think that being guess-y has been quite good for my own work and social life; and that me being guess-y has helped me lead a variety of projects, teams, and communities.

Guess culture:

• Teaches you to model those around you: what they need, how they think.
  • Being able to do this well is a superpower. It wins friends & influences people. To sell something to someone, you need to be able to speak his language, know what matters to him, simulate his responses ahead of time
  • It’s a key skill in product design: to build the right “product” (whether a website, an event, an essay), you need to understand what your users want and how they would react
• Reduces the transaction costs of explicit communication
  • Eg when your friend stays from out of town, if you just remember that she’s vegan and buy groceries accordingly, you save discussion & negotiation on what you’ll eat together once she arrives.
    • Sure, you can ask her food preferences (and you should if you don’t know!); but there are 30 things like this and it’s expensive to ask for every one
  • Asking induces latency (especially asking asynchronously, over text or email); simulating people is immediate
    • “Easier to [guess &] beg forgiveness than ask permission”
• Promotes group harmony, vs individualistic rationalist norms
  • Guess culture is more other-oriented (”what do you need?”), while ask culture is self-oriented (”what do I need?”)
  • Isn’t it nice when you show up at a friend’s house and your needs are magically taken care of, without having to ask?
• Encourages reliance & interdependence (which is a Good Thing)
  • Jenn describes how rich people solve problems with money, whereas poor people rely on favors from friends. For example, a rich person might book an Uber to get to the airport, while a poor person might might get a ride from a friend, with the implicit expectation that she’d return the favor in some way down the line. Which one would you rather be?
    • I think one contributor to “the loneliness pandemic” comes from cheap, efficient, financialized services disintermediating classic human dependencies. Hiring movers instead of moving with friends; ordering Doordash instead of cooking together; Ubering instead of carpooling; AirBnB instead of crashing a friend’s couch.